I looked at her page - and felt like a pervert

Every age group has a different attitude towards the internet. For my parents, it is a baffling oracle to be approached gingerly and in emergencies; for me, it's a sort of electronic fog out of which drops useful facts; but to the generation born after 1980, it is home. They flit around from blogs to ads, to podcasts, as if they were born online, speaking in abbreviations and acronyms with total confidence - and it is this confidence, mixed up with innocence, that makes them so horribly vulnerable to paedophiles.

On Thursday morning, I had a chat with our work experience girl about Mark Bedford, the 21-year-old Canadian paedophile currently in court for abusing British girls online. Bedford met his victims in chatrooms designed specifically for children. Posing as a young girl, he would encourage his new pals to send him photographs of themselves naked, then, when they complied, he'd threaten to post the pictures to their parents unless they sent more graphic shots, which most of the time they did.

"It's scary because everyone uses chatrooms," said the work experience girl. "You would be a social drop-out without one. My friends and I, like, live in a chatroom called Facebook. Do you want to see it?"

Our first stop was the girl's personal Facebook page, her lists of hobbies and favourite bands, and her "message wall" where friends had left comments and replies. Then we flicked through her photo album: the girl hugging a best friend, the girl in a bar, the girl in shorts running a race - young, outgoing, happy. I felt like a pervert. "Can anyone look at your photos?" "Of course!" she said, and smiled.

What a cakewalk for Mark Bedford. No wonder he conned more than 40 adolescent girls. Once a paedophile has access to Facebook, or any of the hundreds of other chatrooms for teens - Myspace, Friendster, Xanga - he can snoop to his heart's content. He can read message walls, learn the lingo and discover which pop bands are cool. He can gather material to create a convincing teenage character for himself, or tailor-make a soul-mate for a particular victim, knowing that few children will have the worldliness to see through his disguise.

Bedford's own alter ego was Samantha, a blonde 15-year-old, whose fake photo and fake diary page, full of bogus girly angst, is still up on the Xanga chatroom. "Christ I get so mad at myself lately. I hate myself, my body, my mind, how lame I am," Bedford wrote. "I wanna be a cosmetologist (sic) and a hairdresser and get certificates to be a massage therapist. I think if I do that, I could open my own shop!"

So Bedford was creative and cunning, but his audience of net-savvy children were also perfectly primed for a paedophile, by their virtual lives. There are no real rules governing internet etiquette, for instance, and in a chatroom, instant intimacy is the norm. Young teens think they are worldly, because they have checked out porn sites, but this misplaced idea of their own sophistication makes them extra easy prey. And though they have been warned to be suspicious of net-based friends, they have too much faith in their own judgment to take notice.

Around 70 per cent of all British and American early teens have regular access to the web, says the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and of that 70 per cent, nearly 10 per cent admit to having happily trotted off, alone, to meet up with an unknown internet buddy.

What is the answer? Should we lock the chatrooms? Wean the kiddies back into the non-virtual world? There is a Bill in the US right now which aims to do just that. The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which plans to ban chatrooms from schools, sailed through the House of Representatives last week and is making for the Senate, spurred on by a collective dream: of children playing tiddleywinks again, and sitting with their parents of an evening discussing current affairs.

It is a futile dream and one that has made headway only because, as an online petition against the Bill points out, most adults have no idea how the internet works. You cannot stop new chatrooms springing up as fast as the old ones are banned, and you cannot keep billions of children from what has become their natural environment. Chatrooms are here to stay, or, as the work experience girl said, "We'll be hanging out online, like, forever," and there is only one effective way I have heard to convince a child to take care, which is to steal a trick from the paedophiles.

A friend of mine recently discovered (through email snooping) that her 13-year-old daughter was planning a forbidden mission to another city to meet up with a boy from Myspace. Was the boy a teenager? Was he safe? It was anyone's guess, so my friend decided to teach her daughter a lesson.

She created a fake profile for herself in Myspace, complete with a bogus photo and a list of hobbies. She messaged her daughter about a band they both liked, and over the next week they became firm online friends. The daughter bitched about her mother, confessed about her online boyfriend, and was soon on her way to a secret meeting with her new pal. The reaction, when the daughter found her mother waiting for her, wasn't pretty. She was horrified, wouldn't speak for a week… but she cancelled her assignation with the boy.